


More Than Coronets

by Nerissa



Category: Original Work
Genre: Blacksmithing, Chocolate Box Treat, Class Differences, F/F, Probably very inaccurate blacksmithing, Vaguely Medieval setting, unnamed character - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-18 06:02:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13675737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nerissa/pseuds/Nerissa
Summary: Joan inherited the forge from her father.She won the lady all by herself.





	More Than Coronets

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Bonster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bonster/gifts).



> Most blacksmithing content is drawn from too many hours spent playing the Sims Medieval and having my lady smiths fall in love with a lot of village maidens. Any accuracy on that front is, therefore, entirely coincidental.

Joan chose to succeed her father because it made good business sense, but nobody else saw it like that. Popular opinion was that she did it because he had no sons, and she meant it as a kindness.

Joan tried not to resent the assumption, and failed.

It didn’t help, of course, that Father shared it.

“You’re sure, Joan?” he’d said, all through autumn and winter and into spring, even as his eyes weakened until he could only make her out as a dim shape in bright light. The most useful man in the hamlet was now useless to everyone except the daughter who loved him and knew his craft well enough to know she preferred to master it herself than see it wielded by another.

“This is really what you want? You’re sure you wouldn’t care to settle down? Raise a family?”

“I don’t know of anything more settled than making my living at the forge, Father,” she’d said mildly, covering her qualms at the possibility of needing to explain herself more clearly than that.

“Mightn’t be an easy life for you.”

“Marriage mightn’t, either.”

“Well,” said Abel Smith, “it's very kind of you, my dear.”

Joan bristled at the accusation. She was not being kind. But she couldn’t find the words she needed to explain that taking over the forge let her escape immediately having to explain what she’d known since she was small enough to climb up the hill to the edge of the forest with other children from the town. They’d wrestled and fought and chased each other around the meadow, diving into ditches as their betters rode past in a clatter of carriage wheels and hoof beats.

Joan had watched lords steal ladies away to the edge of the forest to be wooed, men in fine clothes going down on bent knee with favours extended to the blushing women who stood before them, and she did not understand how the ladies had found those men fit to swoon over. She’d known since that time she did not want to settle her future on a man who would not even stand before her. She’d just not known how to explain herself to her father.

So for now, she didn’t try. She kept him at home until it became clear that his chest and eyes were better suited to cleaner, clearer environs than the forge, Joan found a widow who kept a cottage at the edge of the forest and paid her to keep her father in greater comfort than she herself could contrive. Then she threw herself into the management of what he had settled on her, and made it her own.

There were offers, of course. Men who wanted to learn the trade and offered to take it from her (“and why they think stealing from me is any kind of way to start a courtship,” Joan had fumed to herself, bringing her hammer down with a clang on a fire-bright sheet of metal, “I will be damned if I can guess”) and others, more sensible of what sort of feeling might have inspired her to keep on at the forge, offered to run it with her. She did not vent her spleen at metal on their account, but neither did she accept.

She made something of a name for herself. Her work was, word went, artistic. Not dainty, exactly, or feminine, as people might have expected. Rather it was shaped in a way that spoke of a childhood spent studying curved willow branches and flowers that grew in the ditch.

Her work was  _good_ , and word got around.

Then, three years following her ascension to the family trade, the carriage arrived.

It drew up in the dooryard with no announcement beyond the craft of its own workmanship, expensive in well-sprung simplicity. No excess ornamentation hampered the speed of it, nor did embellishment mar the function. The horses were clean-limbed and well matched, not visibly overbred. The boy who fetched and carried for Joan came rabbiting in all in a hot lather, eyes bulging out of his head, breath coming too short for him to even get a sentence out without stopping to choke on the middle of it.

“Smith Joan Smith Joan Smith Joan it’s a  _lady_.”

She looked at him in plain irritation.

“I’m not taking new customers today, Henry. God’s teeth but you are useless. Go tell her she must come back next week.”

Henry, though, was too stripped of wind to obey. So into the smoky gloom of the forge, heralded only by Henry’s wheezes, stepped . . . well , he was right.

It was a lady.

She, like her horses, had good colouring. Her hair was not red or brown but something between the two, combed up off her neck and held with pins whose heads winked with cabochon-cut rubies. Her face had a kind of open, generous curiosity to it that made Joan suddenly aware of how her own must look, blacked over with soot and sweat-bright at the creases.

“Hurr,” she said, a little helplessly, and was painfully conscious of sounding no more articulate in that moment than Henry.

“That is,” rapidly recovering some of her business acumen, “good afternoon, Madam. I am afraid my boy should have told you I can accept no more commissions this week. Overbooked, you see.”

“I see.” The lady looked around in the same bright, friendly interest. “Well then, I shall return tomorrow.”

Joan frowned.

“My lady, I beg your pardon but I really cannot—”

“Yes, thank you, I understand. You are booked through the week. But you see, if I return tomorrow, I shall be glad of the excuse to take the air and . . . enjoy the company.”

She smiled directly at Joan, and it was, Joan said after, like a kind of forge-blindness that struck her then, except the culprit was not her hearth.

“Oh,” said Joan.

And she stood there at the bellows, staring, until the lady went back to her carriage and rode away.

 

* * *

 

The lady was as good as her word, returning the next day to share company and watch Joan work. Joan had made a furtive effort to scrub away some of the soot on the less-likely surfaces, but the effort was only as effective as circumstances allowed, which was to say, not at all. Even so the lady came in wearing a suitably dark gown that would not betray the dirt, and sat on a chair for quite three quarters of an hour, watching Joan at her labour.

She did not speak, which made a pleasant change from Henry’s incessant beaking, and at the end of her tenure on the edge of the bench she rose, said “thank you for your time. I will call again tomorrow,” and took her leave before Joan could think of a civil rejoinder.

On the third day, Joan carried a small three-legged stool down from her own living quarters and set it beside the much dirtier bench. The smooth pine surface stood out from the rest of the gloom, bright and clean with welcome. When the lady arrived she took in the sight of it with a smile every bit as radiant and out of place in its surroundings.

“You are very kind,” she decided, and Joan was glad that the heat spreading over her neck and down her face could very easily be blamed on the fire.

 

* * *

 

On the fourth day she came with a hamper.

“I hope,” she said, “you will join me to eat? I have brought altogether too much.”

Joan considered her workload. Then she considered the hamper, which smelled like fresh bread and something tantalizingly spicy. She swallowed.

“I would not do you the discourtesy of refusing.”

They went out into the open air and shared the lady’s meal.

“Your cook is very skilled,” Joan said, since it seemed like she ought to say something.

“Thank you,” said the lady, and her blush betrayed her as the creator of the meal. Joan felt like she should take back her compliment, to save embarrassment, but did not know how. So instead she had to hear the lady murmur, “you are very kind.”

Joan flushed.

“I’m really not.”

“Don’t contradict me,” the lady scolded her lightly. “Can’t you see I’m making you a compliment?”

“And perjuring yourself into the bargain,” Joan muttered, but she did not argue the point further.

 

* * *

 

On the morning of the fifth day, Joan made a desperate effort to clean the forge. She muddled it entirely, especially because she set Henry to fetch the water and he muffed it by slopping all the ashes into a muck that could not be scraped out by any mortal means, so Joan was forced to bank the fire to dangerous heights and open every window and door just in an effort to dry the place out.

The lady, thankfully, did not come in the morning. Neither though did she come at midday, and by evening Joan was conscious of faint despair, even as she finished the final commission she had accepted for the week.

Perhaps, she thought, a forge was only a suitable diversion for a short time. Of course there was no reason it should appeal to a lady any longer than that . . . except she had detected in the lady no loss of interest.

Maybe she simply had not wished to.

She was on the verge of putting out the candles for the night when the door was flung open and the lady rushed in, hair windblown, cheeks bright, chest heaving.

“Oh!” she gasped. “Oh, good, I . . . I ran . . . the whole . . . way.”

Joan fetched her a cup of water and the three-legged stool. The lady feebly, gratefully availed herself of both. Presently she had recovered wind enough to say,

“See? You are very kind.”

Joan dragged her toe across the floor, annoyed at having been caught in kindness.

“I’m a good host, is all.”

“I told you, it’s very rude to contradict.”

Joan smiled.

“I’m glad you’re here to tell me again.”

“I very nearly wasn’t. My father forbade me the carriage. He didn’t like me going out so much this week. He said it would cause talk, and talk ruins marriage prospects.”

“Bosh,” said Joan.

“I don’t know. He is usually right about that sort of thing.”

“It couldn’t ruin yours,” Joan said positively. The lady looked up at her in friendly curiosity.

“No? You don’t think?”

“I don’t see how anything ever could.”

The lady’s cheeks brightened again, and this time, exercise was not to blame.

“You  _are_  kind.”

“I’m honest, is all,” Joan muttered. And then, seeing the question rise, quelled it with a scowl. “That wasn’t a contradiction. Just fact.”

“Oh,” said the lady, “well in that case, I suppose we can let it stand.” And she settled her hand, ever so lightly, on the back of Joan’s.

It burned like bright fire even after she took it away.

“I had better start home,” she said quietly. “I only wanted to remind you that . . . well, even if I have to walk to fetch it, I do want a commission next week.”

“I remember,” said Joan. She got up and started for the back of the forge. The lady looked after her in some confusion.

“Don’t you want the commission?”

“Of course.”

“Then where are you going?”

“To get my coat,” said Joan, and suited the action to the word. “I’ll walk you home.”

She punctuated this offer with a scowl so forbidding that the lady, though she beamed in triumph at this further support of her belief, did not dare actually accuse Joan of kindness even once on the walk home.

 

* * *

 

Joan spent all weekend cleaning the forge.

She did not ask Henry to help.

She did make him haul hot water for her, though. A whole tub’s worth. She put it to vigorous, almost violent use, scraping every layer of grime off of every surface, from between every crevice, and out from under every part of her that could possibly be concealing it. At the end of her labour she fell into bed, as thoroughly exhausted as if she’d spent the whole day beating swords into ploughshares.

She hoped the effect would be as worthy as the effort.

 

* * *

 

The first customer the next day was a local merchant and Joan fought against the impulse to rush him through the process, forcing herself to take his order with the sort of scrupulous consideration that a valuable customer required. But she could not conceal her loss of focus when another shadow fell across her doorsill, and the lady stepped through.

“Good morning, Madam,” she hailed her, and marvelled that she could sound so calm.

“Good morning, Joan Smith. Would you be so kind as to accept a commission from me?”

“Well,” said Joan, her voice still steady even as her heart picked up to a clattering gallop, “I s’pose I could make the time.”

The lady moved into the forge with the sort of easy grace that comes of living in a fine stone keep and knowing that your father owns just about everything in the world . . . at least, the world as far as the villagers knew it.

But she also looked at Joan with the kind of tender uncertainty that came of knowing your father owned you, too, and you were prepared to risk the safety that came of such a thing if it could only mean your freedom.

“At first I thought I wanted a coronet,” said the lady. “A circlet to wear at meals. But I’ve changed my mind. I want . . . I want a ring. I’ve made a sketch. You see?”

She laid it on the bench between them and Joan admired the lines of the design, the sweep and curl of the minimal ornamentation. But still . . .

“I’m no jeweller, my lady.”

“No?” the lady smiled, and placed a hand, warm with confidence, on the back of Joan’s. All at once Joan felt as if she could have wrought a Queen’s ransom in baubles from nothing but iron ore. Such was the contagion of the lady’s faith in her.

She cleared her throat.

“I suppose there’s no harm in trying.”

 

* * *

 

Joan refused to let the lady see her ring before it was finished. She worked the metal late at night, so she could be confident of no interruption, and was surprised to discover that in fact she was not so poor a jeweller as she had feared.

It took shape under her attention, flattish, darkish, as smooth and unfractured as she could contrive to make it. At the end of the week the lady, who had kept her impatience remarkably under control, finally betrayed her eagerness as she arrived on foot, as she had done every day that week, and asked,

“Well?”

“Well,” said Joan. “See for yourself.”

It was wide enough to cover the lady’s finger from first to second knuckle, beaten fine and thin, worked with tiny curls and curves that might have been willow branches, if you had a good imagination and a charitable understanding of trees.

“It’s perfect.” The lady moved to fit it to her hand, but Joan forestalled her. She stood very tall, and pale, and offered a humble confession.

“I made two.”

The lady smiled.

 

* * *

 

They fitted the rings to one another’s fingers under the same trees at the edge of the forest, in a clearing where Joan, when still a child, had not been tempted at the thought of a man who’d bend his knee and seek her hand.

Joan’s father, not asking for any explanation, was in attendance. He listened as Joan very carefully did not apologize to her wife for being able to offer her only a forge and a ring she’d made on it. This reticence was not so much out of respect for her father as it was due to the fact that her lady had known she would want to make exactly that apology, and so had told her firmly beforehand that apologizing to your wife for giving her all she ever hoped to call her own would be the height of ill manners.

So Joan did not say sorry; only “I will” and the lady returned her vow. Then they were both embraced by Joan’s father, who insisted that her lady should look on him as her father now too. They shared a meal and well-wishes before the old smith went back to his cottage and the current smith took her wife back into town.

“You did so well,” her lady whispered as they climbed the stairs that night. “I made sure you would say you were sorry and I was ready to scold you if you tried.”

“I wanted to,” Joan admitted.

“I know you did,” said her wife. “But that is only because you want to give me what you imagine I deserve, because, my love, you are so  _very_ —”

But there were things Joan did not want to hear anymore of, either. She did not forbid it, of course: for one, her lady would not have listened, and for another, she had far pleasanter ways of buying silence than that.

“Oh,” whispered her wife, in the darkness of the warm little room tucked safe above the forge, “ _oh_.”

Joan’s was an underhanded means of persuasion, perhaps.

Relentless, to be sure.

But it was not unkind.


End file.
